That was when the cabinet above the kitchen counter swung open on its own.
Slowly, I turned around to see what I’d heard. It was open, fully and completely open, with no breeze, or a vibration. Absolutely nothing.
“If you're paying rent," I said carefully, "you can open cabinets all you want. Otherwise, we need to establish some boundaries."
The cabinet stayed open and I felt stupid talking to myself.
An hour later, the lights in the hallway flickered twice and went out for three full seconds before coming back on. I found the fuse box, checked every breaker, found nothing wrong, and made a note to call an electrician Monday morning.
Babe,I thought.This house is old, of course the wiring is weird.
I fellasleep on my air mattress at ten o'clock with a cozy mystery open on my chest and every light in the bedroom on, which was absolutely a personal choice and had nothing to do with the whispering sound I had heard drifting up from somewhere beneath the floorboards just after nine.
Old pipes,I told myself again as I drifted off.Just old pipes.
Outside, the street was completely still.
2
AZRAEL
Iwas three pages from the end of a binding contract written in the blood of a fourteenth century Cardinal when I felt the shift in the air that told me someone new had arrived on this street.
The presence was female, unmated, and unmistakably Omega, carried on a thread of scent so faint I would have missed it entirely if I had not been paying attention. I set the book down and looked across the street for the first time. She was standing on her porch in an oversized sweatshirt, petite and honey-skinned, her dark thick curls braided back from her face, holding a coffee mug in both hands like it was the only warm thing in the world and she intended to keep it.
I picked the book back up and turned the page.
Of all the humans who could have bought that house,I thought with a shake of my head.
I should explain who I am, because it matters.
I have lived in Blackthorn Ridge since before it had a name. I was here when it was a trading post with a bad reputation and three buildings that didn't deserve to be called buildings. I watched it grow into a town the way you watch somethingyou have no particular feelings about. The way you watch might watch the weather channel, as background noise.
My name isAzrael.I’m an Alpha demon and the Hellgate is my life’s mission.
It sits beneath the ridge at the back of this property line, a seam in the barrier between realms that wore thin over millennia until someone, a very long time ago, made the catastrophic decision to try and widen it deliberately. They didn’t succeed, and what they left behind was something between a door and a wound. It was sealed now under layers of infernal warding that I had maintained and reinforced across five hundred and thirty seven years without significant incident. The town above it had no idea, and that was the preferred outcome.
I stayed to myself and maintained the wards. I tended the garden in the summers and spent winters reading things that would have concerned most people. I was a demon with a routine, and that routine had kept the Gate contained and allowed the town to remain intact.
Then one woman bought the house next door and the Gate started humming like something waking up from a very long sleep.
I set the Cardinal's contract on the side table and did not think about her at all.
I checked the wards at dusk the way I always did, walking the tree line at the back of the property until the energy beneath my feet shifted and I knew I was standing at the edge of the outer seal. I crouched and pressed two fingers to the ground.
The seals held. The warding was intact. The Gate itself was dormant and contained, exactly as it had been yesterday and the month before that and the decade before that.
And then, underneath all of it, I caught something that had not been there twenty four hours ago.
It was a thread, faint and barely perceptible, running up through the earth like a root finding water. The Gate was not reacting to her presence in any dramatic way. It was simply aware of her, oriented toward her the way a compass orients toward north, quiet and automatic and impossible to mistake for anything other than what it was.
The Hellgate had been dormant for sixty years. I hadn’t felt it respond to a human presence since the last Omega who passed through this town in 1987. She was a woman who had stopped for gas and kept driving, gone before the Gate could do more than stir once in its sleep.
This one had signed a deed, lock stock and fucking barrel.
Satan’s nutsack, I rubbed at the base of my neck.
I straightened up and walked back toward the house, and I told myself the tightness across my shoulders was professional concern and nothing else.
